6 ms·

Cuil relaunches as 'cpedia.' The results are not pretty.

102 points by raganwald 17y ago

tptacek 17y ago
Cuil itself is still there. But yeah that's pretty bad. Here's one of the first grafs on "cuil" in cpedia: Best Web Hosting Offer Cuil launches with an index of 120 billion web pages making it a most comprehensive magic! Affiliate Secrets search engine on the web and also a potential try to get the Google competitor. Clickbooth Cuil but not avail due to flooding traffics and making their servers 'too hot' to handle. After googling Cuil is down at the moment to 'cool' down.
JeffJenkins 17y ago
I have a really common name, which I apparently share with a baseball player. The page on the baseball player is awful: http://cpedia.com/search?q=jeffrey+jenkins http://cpedia.com/search?q=jeffrey+jenkins What's really funny about this page is that a quick search reveals that the Milwaukee Brewers have a "Geoff Jenkins" and a "Jeffrey Hammond"
ottbot 17y ago
Interesting, very optimistic project.. Put it just produces a mash of out of context snippets. The biggest problem is that it seems unable to identify introductory information very well, or eliminate references due to news items. I tried a couple of things: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=computational+fluid+dynamics http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=computational+fluid+dynamics http://cpedia.com/search?q=London%20Underground http://cpedia.com/search?q=London%20Underground Can anyone find something useful? I'd like to see a good article.
- techiferous 17y ago
  Yes, they definitely have a signal-to-noise problem: http://cpedia.com/search?q=sam+ruby http://cpedia.com/search?q=sam+ruby I've been trying to find just one good article, but so far, no luck.
- algolicious 17y ago
  Here is one. One of the top results right now on Reddit is a picture of Turnip Rock. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bp49v/island_pic/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bp49v/island_pic/ But Wikipedia doesn't have a page on Turnip Rock. Cpedia has one that isn't completely worthless. http://cpedia.com/search?q=turnip+rock http://cpedia.com/search?q=turnip+rock
- duskwuff 17y ago
  Another embarrassingly bad article: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America
Hates_ 17y ago
The Ruby on Rails one is particularly amusing. http://cpedia.com/search?q=ruby+on+rails http://cpedia.com/search?q=ruby+on+rails
- petercooper 17y ago
  Wow, there's an entire subsection on that page about me.. except, well, it isn't, despite being named as such. Laugh out loud bad, just like Cuil. This is more nefarious than Mahalo. It's spam wrapped up in poorly summarised, chopped up content they have no right to be using.
  - mark_l_watson 17y ago
    Hello Peter, since you have one of the most widely read Ruby sites, I am not surprised that you showed up. Makes sense if you think abut how they implemented this. I agree with your comments.
- jackowayed 17y ago
  Wow, yeah. The first section is Merb ... ok. Then there's a ROR subsection of Merb. Um, what? And the first paragraph of the ROR subsection clearly was copied and pasted from some consultancy's "Our decicated RoR developers can create web 2.0 applications using latest Ruby on Rails web services." (Ok, not quite copied and pasted. They managed to work in a typo ("decicated").) And then the paragraph immediately after that doesn't follow at all. It starts: >When he [Brian Mastenbrook] was able to reproduce the glitch at Basecamp, he began to suspect that the flaw was inherent to Ruby on Rails, the popular Web framework used by both websites. Did they do QA before launching this thing?
  - timdoug 17y ago
    My favorite Merb subsection: "g. I'll be at RailsConf in Berlin"
  - senki 17y ago
    http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-... >I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”
slig 17y ago
I searched for "wikipedia" and the results couldn't be worse: http://imgur.com/nXKXj.png http://imgur.com/nXKXj.png
- statictype 17y ago
  Strangely enough, the auto-completion box, when you type 'wikip', shows www.wikipedia.org complete with Wikipedia logo as the first result.
unignorant 17y ago
Were this done correctly, it would be an amazing feat of NLP. Unfortunately, it is not... You can't just mash snippets together piecemeal. Context matters. I'm surprised they even released it; the few search terms I attempted generated useless results.
- Daemmerung 17y ago
  M-x dissociated-press
byrneseyeview 17y ago
Demand Media must be relieved. Despite all the jokes, Cuil's team has a very impressive background. But they've just made it clear that the cheapest way to create prose online is still to pay people $10-$15 per article.
moe 17y ago
I tried a few seemingly easy searches ("Obama", "ipod") and it only ever returns random noise. I just hope this garbage gets blacklisted in real search engines ASAP, before it starts polluting results.
- secret 17y ago
  I just tried your searches. Is their a word in English for third-party embarrassment?
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Closest thing in colloquial english is 'douche chills' In Dutch it's called 'plaatsvervangende schaamte' which literally means "place exchanging shame". Shame felt on behalf of someone else, shame you feel someone else should feel. I'm embarrassed for them.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    Vicarious embarrassment?
aheilbut 17y ago
This would have made a great April Fool's joke.
- deleted 17y ago
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- nash 17y ago
  http://cpedia.com/search?q=april+fools+joke http://cpedia.com/search?q=april+fools+joke Not really.
  - MikeCapone 17y ago
    Totally surrealistic! Reminds me of the Cuil Theory poster from that guy on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/a5byc/interrobang_your_wall_with_this_new_cuil_theory/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/a5byc/interrobang_your...
- henryw 17y ago
  Yeah agreed. Look at their results for "apple". Nothing about apple as a fruit or the company Apple. But they got "apple bottom" jeans covered. http://cpedia.com/search?q=apple http://cpedia.com/search?q=apple
  - growt 17y ago
    They should hire the DuckDuckGo guy with whatever is left of their venture capital. His results are much better.
mark_l_watson 17y ago
This is useful because I thought about something similar: clustering text, and using my auto-summarization library to extract key bits and then stich things together. Now, I am not going to try. Lesson learned.
- elblanco 17y ago
  This looks like a hobbyist effort built by somebody messing around with too big of a dataset. Anybody with even a smattering of NLP background could have predicted this quality of results. Computers are simply too stupid to assemble coherent narrative summaries on specific topics. They would require a true AI, and all of the major efforts that might build such a thing (Cyc, Semantic Web, etc.) have produced very little of value in the area.
raquo 17y ago
Wrap this up in Adsense and you get Mahalo 2.0
- slig 17y ago
  You joke, but it's not that far: http://cpedia.com/robots.txt http://cpedia.com/robots.txt — No disallow on /wiki Except, maybe, that mahalo's "content" is far better scraped.
  - deleted 17y ago
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  - neilk 17y ago
    Their robots.txt is password protected now. (?) I'm not sure what a crawler is supposed to conclude in that case. I don't see a lot of cpedia content on Google yet. The only links I can see are clearly due to the threads here and on sites like Reddit.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      Last I checked, Google's crawler treated 4xx errors on a /robots.txt (which includes unauthorized/not-allowed) the same as 404-not-found. (In most cases, it's a configuration error by the site owner, and for those sites where it's intentional, the operator is savvy enough to block crawler access to other URLs by password or user-agent if desired.)
    - blasdel 17y ago
      Now it's this: User-agent: * Disallow: /imgsrv Disallow: /search Disallow: /pref Disallow: /suggest
    - chbarts 17y ago
      > Their robots.txt is password protected now. (?) It lets you in regardless of the username/password combination. I just logged in with this: username: you morons password: this defeats the whole damn purpose I wonder if any of this gets logged at their end.
mattdennewitz 17y ago
oh, this is a complete disaster :(
snorkel 17y ago
Have no fear. If you click "View web search results" you get back to the same classic cuil you know and love.
kbrower 17y ago
This reminds me of TS Elliot's The Wasteland. We just don't get it yet. http://www.writtenhumor.com/wasteland.html http://www.writtenhumor.com/wasteland.html
techiferous 17y ago
My professional web development career, boiled down to one piece of useless trivia: http://cpedia.com/search?q=techiferous http://cpedia.com/search?q=techiferous
- dangrover 17y ago
  I love Diesel Cafe!
- blasdel 17y ago
  Mine is way worse: "Careful, blasdelf ineptness is one of their core competencies. Sounds like copyright infringement." -- http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf
  - mos1 17y ago
    Results for my real name indicate that I have a doctorate, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and that I was last sold for $650,000.
    - techiferous 17y ago
      Hilarious! The results for my real name are disturbing: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=wyatt+greene http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=wyatt+greene
acangiano 17y ago
What a train wreck: http://cpedia.com/search?q=antonio+cangiano http://cpedia.com/search?q=antonio+cangiano
danieldon 17y ago
I really don't understand cuil. I feel really bad criticizing someone's hard work, but this company is not a one man operation; it's a team of smart, experienced people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital. They must be aware of their reputation and that they are the butt of jokes for exactly the kind of stuff we are now seeing in cpedia. What is the strategy? Do they think they can just ride out having such a bad repuation while they try to perfect the service?
- techiferous 17y ago
  "it's a team of smart people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital." This is probably a weakness, not a strength. If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else.
  - deleted 17y ago
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  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Also, it would only be subject to self-delusion and not the feedback loop of groupthink.
    - ahoyhere 17y ago
      And the "us" vs "them" mentality. It's much easier to fall into for smart, sane people when they're surrounded by other people doing the same thing. After all, if it's so nuts, why doesn't Joanna / Bob quit?. Social proof.
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    "If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else." Or actually get it to work,like DuckDuckGo. One man operation. Impressive results. Contrasting DuckDuckGo and Cuil is enlightening in all kinds of ways.
- farnsworth 17y ago
techiferous 17y ago
There is a potential for misquoting people. Read the last line of the summary section here: http://cpedia.com/search?q=railsconf http://cpedia.com/search?q=railsconf Read literally, Paul Krill was the author of the entire article after the summary. Because this content is pieced together by computers who have no idea of how the resulting piece reads as a whole, I wonder if there are hidden legal liabilities when words get stuffed into people's mouths or when the combinations of sections lead to false content (imagine one paragraph ending with "and found the following to be completely false:"). EDIT: Here's an article misquoting a lawyer. Not smart. ;) http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=palin#headline_31 http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=palin#headline_31
vaksel 17y ago
the c stands for crap the goal here isn't to find the one funny/stupid article...with this site the goal should be to find one article that actually makes sense
edmccaffrey 17y ago
You would expect something with a disambiguation page for your search, and a topic-specific page for what you are looking for would have relevant information on that topic, but: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Haskell&disambig=Functional%20Programming http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Haskell&disambig=Functional...
techiferous 17y ago
If you search for George Bush, all you get is an airport. http://www.cpedia.com/search?q=george+bush http://www.cpedia.com/search?q=george+bush And a search for Cheney does not show the former Vice President: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=cheney http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=cheney
Detrus 17y ago
I think you guys are missing the big picture here. This is a brilliant PR move. The hilarity contained in this thing is on par with encyclopedia dramatica. It will become part of the 4chan, lolcats web culture and what can be better than that?
- jimboyoungblood 17y ago
  Yes, I'm sure this is exactly what their VC's were hoping for with their $millions.
thorax 17y ago
Are we sure this isn't just an experiment of theirs? Some 20% project from one of their engineers using info they already had at their disposal? For a side experiment, I'm not going to fault or bash any company-- we've got a few of our own experiments which aren't the prettiest/best sites in the world.
- algolicious 17y ago
  Nope, they seem to think it reflects their vision: http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-...
  - deleted 17y ago
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  - thorax 17y ago
    Well, it does sound like the know it's more of a long-shot "weird" idea and they call it an "alpha". One quote from the blog: > At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all. I can see a lot of hackers wanting to try something like this and see if they can iteratively make it better and better and better. Doesn't this sort of a site sound like something people here would love to toy with? > For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces. I personally think it's cool for people to try weird things like this-- even if the attempts fail.
    - i80and 17y ago
      I agree. While at the moment it's kind of cruddy in the current implementation, I gotta respect them for playing with what really is a fun idea. If they do manage to get it working better (extremely difficult and iffy), Cpedia could be a pretty cool tool.
jbyers 17y ago
In the last two minutes the raganwald page was removed. The page for us is interesting. Huge amounts of content, flashes of brilliance, and moments of sheer terror. http://cpedia.com/search?q=wikispaces http://cpedia.com/search?q=wikispaces
- raganwald 17y ago
  Well then, I guess the mods can kill this. I wondered if this might happen, so I have a screen shot: http://twitpic.com/1ek18g/full http://twitpic.com/1ek18g/full The moods could also relink this thread of conversation to the screen shot.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Mods autocorrected to moods? Unintentionally funny, just like cpedia!
    - techiferous 17y ago
      "One cuil = one level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation." http://bit.ly/PHPAR http://bit.ly/PHPAR One cpedia = one level of unintentional comedy. For example, if the content that cpedia collected into an article ends up being unintentionally humorous, that's 1 cpedia. If the arrangement/ordering of the content adds to the humor, that's 2 cpedias.
    - raganwald 17y ago
      I'll let it stand, you deserve upmods for pointing that out!
      - cubicle67 17y ago
        upmoods?
adharmad 17y ago
This is hilarious: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=cuil http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=cuil
cmars232 17y ago
Maybe they're looking to get into the parked domain business?
petewarden 17y ago
Here's an article from Cuil's blog about the launch: http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-... "I was a stay at home dad, I dropped by Kleiner Perkins to try to get some money to write a search engine". This has to be an elaborate piece of satirical performance art.
- jimboyoungblood 17y ago
  Personally I thought the link to "gay sex" in a product announcement was the kicker. (It was the only link in the article, btw)
  - akkartik 17y ago
    And why was it going to cuil rather than cpedia?
- nash 17y ago
  I'll be using it as an example if I need to explain "surreal" to someone...
  - slig 17y ago
    It has been done: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raids_reveal_baby_farms/c06cqxb http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raid...
iuguy 17y ago
Just look at http://cpedia.com/search?q=Paul%20Graham&d=raganwald http://cpedia.com/search?q=Paul%20Graham&d=raganwald - I'd get more relevant and complete information from a markov chain...
- deleted 17y ago
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deleted 17y ago
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jluxenberg 17y ago
People give Cuil search a lot of crap, but I actually find their results to be pretty good. Their clustering algorithm is cool too and good for exploration. Which is something that other search engines don't seem to do very well.
- spc476 17y ago
  I've found Clusty ( http://clusty.com http://clusty.com ) to be quite good. I can't quite make out what the heck is supposed to be going on with this cpedia thing.
benatkin 17y ago
I thought it was "curl" at first, and it was due to some crazy late trademark battle. I was glad to see it was Cuil. (Just got in from a bike ride, sitting farther away from the monitor than usual.)
pclark 17y ago
"PClark has never once asked for someone to pay for his passion to ride the old Auroras" true that.
- lepht 17y ago
  The amazing part is that this seems to be universally true. I'm also a "pclark", and I can attest to the accuracy of this statement. Watch your backs, Google, these guys are onto something.
jrockway 17y ago
The jrockway page is similarly excellent: "Git doesn't include a source code editor, profiler, or web browser, either. That means your syntax-highlighted code-blocks look the same on your slides as in Emacs :)" I'm not sure how it gets from here to there. I did write eslide, however...
stcredzero 17y ago
Could this be a result of optimizing algorithms to solve hard problems? (Not understanding that the first trials people would send the thing would be simple searches to be compared to the Google results?) Some of the results are so funny that some groupthink has to be involved as well.
techiferous 17y ago
Perhaps this is more a branding/marketing fail than a technology fail. First of all, the cuil brand is so badly marred that it should be abandoned, but cpedia holds onto it. Secondly, what is cpedia? Is it just an interesting side project/proof-of-concept? Or is it trying to be a search engine game changer? Depending on what it is, I have different opinions on it, so it's important when launching it to describe what it is. It's actually a really cool side project/toy app.
gojomo 17y ago
Hidden inside the vaguely markov-chain/chinglish-like nonsense is an interesting idea: deduplicate the reference-information web. Even before the recent explosion of spablum (spam/pablum/made-for-adsense) sites, using the web to learn about something involved reading a lot of duplicate info. When learning about topic X, you might visit site #1 and learn A, B, C, D, E. Then, site #2 has B, C, D, F, G. Then, site #3 has A, C, E, G, H. Even if H is the key thing you personally wanted to know, by the time you got to it, you'd encountered most other things 2 or more times, and even the 'gem' of a result, site #3, was 80% redundant. A wonderful summary page would have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, all in one place, properly contextualized. The best Wikipedia articles serve this role and that's why they're deservedly atop many search results. But the obvious utility of summary pages has prompted a race to create more of them, by automated and editorial means. When such attempts fall even a little bit short, they make the problem worse not better -- polluting the web with more permutations of the exact same information, hiding the rare gems in more muck. I'd like to start a project to attack this problem head-on, and would love to hear from others who might want to collaborate.
jacquesm 17y ago
What bugs me is how these guys got their funding simply on the off chance that if you're an ex-googler you might know something that others don't. Gigablast, duck-duck-go are outperforming cuil where it matters, and they're getting quite close to be being able to supplant google. Cuils founders ought to be at least slightly embarrassed by that.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Even the most cursory of testing reveals that the results of this are no good. I have no idea why they would pull the trigger and release this.
  - holygoat 17y ago
    They already did it once (the first time they launched, and Cuil was a POS). Insane.
chbarts 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique http://cpedia.com/search?q=william+s+burroughs http://cpedia.com/search?q=william+s+burroughs Had they positioned this as an art project applying the cut-up technique to the Web as a whole, it would be seen as a real success. cpedia itself speaks: "Along with JG Ballard, Angela Carter and Anna Kavan, William S. Burroughs has probably done more to influence my writing, my reading, and my appreciation of literature than any other writer." (No attribution in article. I like to think of this as the software's own appreciation showing through.)
schwanksta 17y ago
Try googling a journalist or someone with a byline that appears often. http://cpedia.com/search?q=Hilary%20Lehman http://cpedia.com/search?q=Hilary%20Lehman
elblanco 17y ago
Somebody should build a mashup of the cpedia results with translation party. http://translationparty.com/ http://translationparty.com/
jamesjyu 17y ago
Sadly, Bing's concept of search overload comes to mind on every page of cpedia.
Tycho 17y ago
I quite like the pane on the right though with the hover-over feature. Let me learn a few things within a field that I wouldn't have known otherwise nor had the motivation to find out.
modeless 17y ago
After I stopped laughing (which took quite a while), I noticed that this thing occasionally surfaces some interesting information that I didn't even realize was on the web. If they presented the results in a way that was a bit more coherent, and linked back to their sources, this thing might actually be useful for something other than comedy.
orblivion 17y ago
Oh, this poor company. I don't think this is going to work out.
api 17y ago
How does crap on a plate like this get funding when there are so many more worthy projects out there?

102 points by raganwald 17y ago

Cuil itself is still there. But yeah that's pretty bad. Here's one of the first grafs on "cuil" in cpedia: Best Web Hosting Offer Cuil launches with an index of 120 billion web pages making it a most comprehensive magic! Affiliate Secrets search engine on the web and also a potential try to get the Google competitor. Clickbooth Cuil but not avail due to flooding traffics and making their servers 'too hot' to handle. After googling Cuil is down at the moment to 'cool' down.

JeffJenkins 17y ago

I have a really common name, which I apparently share with a baseball player. The page on the baseball player is awful: http://cpedia.com/search?q=jeffrey+jenkins http://cpedia.com/search?q=jeffrey+jenkins What's really funny about this page is that a quick search reveals that the Milwaukee Brewers have a "Geoff Jenkins" and a "Jeffrey Hammond"

ottbot 17y ago

Interesting, very optimistic project.. Put it just produces a mash of out of context snippets. The biggest problem is that it seems unable to identify introductory information very well, or eliminate references due to news items. I tried a couple of things: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=computational+fluid+dynamics http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=computational+fluid+dynamics http://cpedia.com/search?q=London%20Underground http://cpedia.com/search?q=London%20Underground Can anyone find something useful? I'd like to see a good article.

techiferous 17y ago
Yes, they definitely have a signal-to-noise problem: http://cpedia.com/search?q=sam+ruby http://cpedia.com/search?q=sam+ruby I've been trying to find just one good article, but so far, no luck.
algolicious 17y ago
Here is one. One of the top results right now on Reddit is a picture of Turnip Rock. http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bp49v/island_pic/ http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bp49v/island_pic/ But Wikipedia doesn't have a page on Turnip Rock. Cpedia has one that isn't completely worthless. http://cpedia.com/search?q=turnip+rock http://cpedia.com/search?q=turnip+rock
duskwuff 17y ago
Another embarrassingly bad article: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=United+States+of+America

Hates_ 17y ago

The Ruby on Rails one is particularly amusing. http://cpedia.com/search?q=ruby+on+rails http://cpedia.com/search?q=ruby+on+rails

petercooper 17y ago
Wow, there's an entire subsection on that page about me.. except, well, it isn't, despite being named as such. Laugh out loud bad, just like Cuil. This is more nefarious than Mahalo. It's spam wrapped up in poorly summarised, chopped up content they have no right to be using.
- mark_l_watson 17y ago
  Hello Peter, since you have one of the most widely read Ruby sites, I am not surprised that you showed up. Makes sense if you think abut how they implemented this. I agree with your comments.
jackowayed 17y ago
Wow, yeah. The first section is Merb ... ok. Then there's a ROR subsection of Merb. Um, what? And the first paragraph of the ROR subsection clearly was copied and pasted from some consultancy's "Our decicated RoR developers can create web 2.0 applications using latest Ruby on Rails web services." (Ok, not quite copied and pasted. They managed to work in a typo ("decicated").) And then the paragraph immediately after that doesn't follow at all. It starts: >When he [Brian Mastenbrook] was able to reproduce the glitch at Basecamp, he began to suspect that the flaw was inherent to Ruby on Rails, the popular Web framework used by both websites. Did they do QA before launching this thing?
- timdoug 17y ago
  My favorite Merb subsection: "g. I'll be at RailsConf in Berlin"
- senki 17y ago
  http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-... >I find Cpedia best on topics that I thought I knew about. I find out things I should have known but didn’t. I’ve noticed productivity has slowed in the company since we have had it up for internal testing, as people ask each other about stranger and stranger trivia, or exclaim, “I didn’t know your middle name was Hector?”

slig 17y ago

I searched for "wikipedia" and the results couldn't be worse: http://imgur.com/nXKXj.png http://imgur.com/nXKXj.png

statictype 17y ago
Strangely enough, the auto-completion box, when you type 'wikip', shows www.wikipedia.org complete with Wikipedia logo as the first result.

unignorant 17y ago

Were this done correctly, it would be an amazing feat of NLP. Unfortunately, it is not... You can't just mash snippets together piecemeal. Context matters. I'm surprised they even released it; the few search terms I attempted generated useless results.

Daemmerung 17y ago
M-x dissociated-press

byrneseyeview 17y ago

Demand Media must be relieved. Despite all the jokes, Cuil's team has a very impressive background. But they've just made it clear that the cheapest way to create prose online is still to pay people $10-$15 per article.

moe 17y ago

I tried a few seemingly easy searches ("Obama", "ipod") and it only ever returns random noise. I just hope this garbage gets blacklisted in real search engines ASAP, before it starts polluting results.

secret 17y ago
I just tried your searches. Is their a word in English for third-party embarrassment?
- blasdel 17y ago
  Closest thing in colloquial english is 'douche chills' In Dutch it's called 'plaatsvervangende schaamte' which literally means "place exchanging shame". Shame felt on behalf of someone else, shame you feel someone else should feel. I'm embarrassed for them.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  Vicarious embarrassment?

aheilbut 17y ago

This would have made a great April Fool's joke.

deleted 17y ago
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nash 17y ago
http://cpedia.com/search?q=april+fools+joke http://cpedia.com/search?q=april+fools+joke Not really.
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Totally surrealistic! Reminds me of the Cuil Theory poster from that guy on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/a5byc/interrobang_your_wall_with_this_new_cuil_theory/ http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/a5byc/interrobang_your...
henryw 17y ago
Yeah agreed. Look at their results for "apple". Nothing about apple as a fruit or the company Apple. But they got "apple bottom" jeans covered. http://cpedia.com/search?q=apple http://cpedia.com/search?q=apple
- growt 17y ago
  They should hire the DuckDuckGo guy with whatever is left of their venture capital. His results are much better.

mark_l_watson 17y ago

This is useful because I thought about something similar: clustering text, and using my auto-summarization library to extract key bits and then stich things together. Now, I am not going to try. Lesson learned.

elblanco 17y ago
This looks like a hobbyist effort built by somebody messing around with too big of a dataset. Anybody with even a smattering of NLP background could have predicted this quality of results. Computers are simply too stupid to assemble coherent narrative summaries on specific topics. They would require a true AI, and all of the major efforts that might build such a thing (Cyc, Semantic Web, etc.) have produced very little of value in the area.

raquo 17y ago

Wrap this up in Adsense and you get Mahalo 2.0

slig 17y ago
You joke, but it's not that far: http://cpedia.com/robots.txt http://cpedia.com/robots.txt — No disallow on /wiki Except, maybe, that mahalo's "content" is far better scraped.
- deleted 17y ago
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- neilk 17y ago
  Their robots.txt is password protected now. (?) I'm not sure what a crawler is supposed to conclude in that case. I don't see a lot of cpedia content on Google yet. The only links I can see are clearly due to the threads here and on sites like Reddit.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    Last I checked, Google's crawler treated 4xx errors on a /robots.txt (which includes unauthorized/not-allowed) the same as 404-not-found. (In most cases, it's a configuration error by the site owner, and for those sites where it's intentional, the operator is savvy enough to block crawler access to other URLs by password or user-agent if desired.)
  - blasdel 17y ago
    Now it's this: User-agent: * Disallow: /imgsrv Disallow: /search Disallow: /pref Disallow: /suggest
  - chbarts 17y ago
    > Their robots.txt is password protected now. (?) It lets you in regardless of the username/password combination. I just logged in with this: username: you morons password: this defeats the whole damn purpose I wonder if any of this gets logged at their end.

mattdennewitz 17y ago

oh, this is a complete disaster :(

snorkel 17y ago

Have no fear. If you click "View web search results" you get back to the same classic cuil you know and love.

kbrower 17y ago

This reminds me of TS Elliot's The Wasteland. We just don't get it yet. http://www.writtenhumor.com/wasteland.html http://www.writtenhumor.com/wasteland.html

techiferous 17y ago

My professional web development career, boiled down to one piece of useless trivia: http://cpedia.com/search?q=techiferous http://cpedia.com/search?q=techiferous

dangrover 17y ago
I love Diesel Cafe!
blasdel 17y ago
Mine is way worse: "Careful, blasdelf ineptness is one of their core competencies. Sounds like copyright infringement." -- http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf http://cpedia.com/search?q=blasdelf
- mos1 17y ago
  Results for my real name indicate that I have a doctorate, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and that I was last sold for $650,000.
  - techiferous 17y ago
    Hilarious! The results for my real name are disturbing: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=wyatt+greene http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=wyatt+greene

acangiano 17y ago

What a train wreck: http://cpedia.com/search?q=antonio+cangiano http://cpedia.com/search?q=antonio+cangiano

danieldon 17y ago

I really don't understand cuil. I feel really bad criticizing someone's hard work, but this company is not a one man operation; it's a team of smart, experienced people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital. They must be aware of their reputation and that they are the butt of jokes for exactly the kind of stuff we are now seeing in cpedia. What is the strategy? Do they think they can just ride out having such a bad repuation while they try to perfect the service?

techiferous 17y ago
"it's a team of smart people with tens of millions of dollars of venture capital." This is probably a weakness, not a strength. If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else.
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- stcredzero 17y ago
  Also, it would only be subject to self-delusion and not the feedback loop of groupthink.
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    And the "us" vs "them" mentality. It's much easier to fall into for smart, sane people when they're surrounded by other people doing the same thing. After all, if it's so nuts, why doesn't Joanna / Bob quit?. Social proof.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "If cuil were a bootstrapped one-person operation it would be very easy to cut the cord and move on to something else." Or actually get it to work,like DuckDuckGo. One man operation. Impressive results. Contrasting DuckDuckGo and Cuil is enlightening in all kinds of ways.
farnsworth 17y ago

techiferous 17y ago

There is a potential for misquoting people. Read the last line of the summary section here: http://cpedia.com/search?q=railsconf http://cpedia.com/search?q=railsconf Read literally, Paul Krill was the author of the entire article after the summary. Because this content is pieced together by computers who have no idea of how the resulting piece reads as a whole, I wonder if there are hidden legal liabilities when words get stuffed into people's mouths or when the combinations of sections lead to false content (imagine one paragraph ending with "and found the following to be completely false:"). EDIT: Here's an article misquoting a lawyer. Not smart. ;) http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=palin#headline_31 http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=palin#headline_31

vaksel 17y ago

the c stands for crap the goal here isn't to find the one funny/stupid article...with this site the goal should be to find one article that actually makes sense

edmccaffrey 17y ago

You would expect something with a disambiguation page for your search, and a topic-specific page for what you are looking for would have relevant information on that topic, but: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Haskell&disambig=Functional%20Programming http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=Haskell&disambig=Functional...

techiferous 17y ago

If you search for George Bush, all you get is an airport. http://www.cpedia.com/search?q=george+bush http://www.cpedia.com/search?q=george+bush And a search for Cheney does not show the former Vice President: http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=cheney http://www.cpedia.com/wiki?q=cheney

Detrus 17y ago

I think you guys are missing the big picture here. This is a brilliant PR move. The hilarity contained in this thing is on par with encyclopedia dramatica. It will become part of the 4chan, lolcats web culture and what can be better than that?

jimboyoungblood 17y ago
Yes, I'm sure this is exactly what their VC's were hoping for with their $millions.

thorax 17y ago

Are we sure this isn't just an experiment of theirs? Some 20% project from one of their engineers using info they already had at their disposal? For a side experiment, I'm not going to fault or bash any company-- we've got a few of our own experiments which aren't the prettiest/best sites in the world.

algolicious 17y ago
Nope, they seem to think it reflects their vision: http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-...
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- thorax 17y ago
  Well, it does sound like the know it's more of a long-shot "weird" idea and they call it an "alpha". One quote from the blog: > At other times it is weird — it does reflect the web after all. I can see a lot of hackers wanting to try something like this and see if they can iteratively make it better and better and better. Doesn't this sort of a site sound like something people here would love to toy with? > For each query, Cpedia algorithmically summarizes and clusters the ideas on the web and uses this to generate a report. We do the heavy lifting of removing all the repetition, so that unique and novel content surfaces. I personally think it's cool for people to try weird things like this-- even if the attempts fail.
  - i80and 17y ago
    I agree. While at the moment it's kind of cruddy in the current implementation, I gotta respect them for playing with what really is a fun idea. If they do manage to get it working better (extremely difficult and iffy), Cpedia could be a pretty cool tool.

jbyers 17y ago

In the last two minutes the raganwald page was removed. The page for us is interesting. Huge amounts of content, flashes of brilliance, and moments of sheer terror. http://cpedia.com/search?q=wikispaces http://cpedia.com/search?q=wikispaces

raganwald 17y ago
Well then, I guess the mods can kill this. I wondered if this might happen, so I have a screen shot: http://twitpic.com/1ek18g/full http://twitpic.com/1ek18g/full The moods could also relink this thread of conversation to the screen shot.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Mods autocorrected to moods? Unintentionally funny, just like cpedia!
  - techiferous 17y ago
    "One cuil = one level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation." http://bit.ly/PHPAR http://bit.ly/PHPAR One cpedia = one level of unintentional comedy. For example, if the content that cpedia collected into an article ends up being unintentionally humorous, that's 1 cpedia. If the arrangement/ordering of the content adds to the humor, that's 2 cpedias.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    I'll let it stand, you deserve upmods for pointing that out!
    - cubicle67 17y ago
      upmoods?

adharmad 17y ago

This is hilarious: http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=cuil http://cpedia.com/wiki?q=cuil

cmars232 17y ago

Maybe they're looking to get into the parked domain business?

petewarden 17y ago

Here's an article from Cuil's blog about the launch: http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-the-automated-encyclopedia http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/08/introducing-cpedia-... "I was a stay at home dad, I dropped by Kleiner Perkins to try to get some money to write a search engine". This has to be an elaborate piece of satirical performance art.

jimboyoungblood 17y ago
Personally I thought the link to "gay sex" in a product announcement was the kicker. (It was the only link in the article, btw)
- akkartik 17y ago
  And why was it going to cuil rather than cpedia?
nash 17y ago
I'll be using it as an example if I need to explain "surreal" to someone...
- slig 17y ago
  It has been done: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raids_reveal_baby_farms/c06cqxb http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/police_raid...

iuguy 17y ago

Just look at http://cpedia.com/search?q=Paul%20Graham&d=raganwald http://cpedia.com/search?q=Paul%20Graham&d=raganwald - I'd get more relevant and complete information from a markov chain...

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jluxenberg 17y ago

People give Cuil search a lot of crap, but I actually find their results to be pretty good. Their clustering algorithm is cool too and good for exploration. Which is something that other search engines don't seem to do very well.

spc476 17y ago
I've found Clusty ( http://clusty.com http://clusty.com ) to be quite good. I can't quite make out what the heck is supposed to be going on with this cpedia thing.

benatkin 17y ago

I thought it was "curl" at first, and it was due to some crazy late trademark battle. I was glad to see it was Cuil. (Just got in from a bike ride, sitting farther away from the monitor than usual.)

pclark 17y ago

"PClark has never once asked for someone to pay for his passion to ride the old Auroras" true that.

lepht 17y ago
The amazing part is that this seems to be universally true. I'm also a "pclark", and I can attest to the accuracy of this statement. Watch your backs, Google, these guys are onto something.

jrockway 17y ago

The jrockway page is similarly excellent: "Git doesn't include a source code editor, profiler, or web browser, either. That means your syntax-highlighted code-blocks look the same on your slides as in Emacs :)" I'm not sure how it gets from here to there. I did write eslide, however...

stcredzero 17y ago

Could this be a result of optimizing algorithms to solve hard problems? (Not understanding that the first trials people would send the thing would be simple searches to be compared to the Google results?) Some of the results are so funny that some groupthink has to be involved as well.

techiferous 17y ago

Perhaps this is more a branding/marketing fail than a technology fail. First of all, the cuil brand is so badly marred that it should be abandoned, but cpedia holds onto it. Secondly, what is cpedia? Is it just an interesting side project/proof-of-concept? Or is it trying to be a search engine game changer? Depending on what it is, I have different opinions on it, so it's important when launching it to describe what it is. It's actually a really cool side project/toy app.

gojomo 17y ago

Hidden inside the vaguely markov-chain/chinglish-like nonsense is an interesting idea: deduplicate the reference-information web. Even before the recent explosion of spablum (spam/pablum/made-for-adsense) sites, using the web to learn about something involved reading a lot of duplicate info. When learning about topic X, you might visit site #1 and learn A, B, C, D, E. Then, site #2 has B, C, D, F, G. Then, site #3 has A, C, E, G, H. Even if H is the key thing you personally wanted to know, by the time you got to it, you'd encountered most other things 2 or more times, and even the 'gem' of a result, site #3, was 80% redundant. A wonderful summary page would have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H, all in one place, properly contextualized. The best Wikipedia articles serve this role and that's why they're deservedly atop many search results. But the obvious utility of summary pages has prompted a race to create more of them, by automated and editorial means. When such attempts fall even a little bit short, they make the problem worse not better -- polluting the web with more permutations of the exact same information, hiding the rare gems in more muck. I'd like to start a project to attack this problem head-on, and would love to hear from others who might want to collaborate.

jacquesm 17y ago

What bugs me is how these guys got their funding simply on the off chance that if you're an ex-googler you might know something that others don't. Gigablast, duck-duck-go are outperforming cuil where it matters, and they're getting quite close to be being able to supplant google. Cuils founders ought to be at least slightly embarrassed by that.

elblanco 17y ago
Even the most cursory of testing reveals that the results of this are no good. I have no idea why they would pull the trigger and release this.
- holygoat 17y ago
  They already did it once (the first time they launched, and Cuil was a POS). Insane.

chbarts 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique http://cpedia.com/search?q=william+s+burroughs http://cpedia.com/search?q=william+s+burroughs Had they positioned this as an art project applying the cut-up technique to the Web as a whole, it would be seen as a real success. cpedia itself speaks: "Along with JG Ballard, Angela Carter and Anna Kavan, William S. Burroughs has probably done more to influence my writing, my reading, and my appreciation of literature than any other writer." (No attribution in article. I like to think of this as the software's own appreciation showing through.)

schwanksta 17y ago

Try googling a journalist or someone with a byline that appears often. http://cpedia.com/search?q=Hilary%20Lehman http://cpedia.com/search?q=Hilary%20Lehman

elblanco 17y ago

Somebody should build a mashup of the cpedia results with translation party. http://translationparty.com/ http://translationparty.com/

jamesjyu 17y ago

Sadly, Bing's concept of search overload comes to mind on every page of cpedia.

Tycho 17y ago

I quite like the pane on the right though with the hover-over feature. Let me learn a few things within a field that I wouldn't have known otherwise nor had the motivation to find out.

modeless 17y ago

After I stopped laughing (which took quite a while), I noticed that this thing occasionally surfaces some interesting information that I didn't even realize was on the web. If they presented the results in a way that was a bit more coherent, and linked back to their sources, this thing might actually be useful for something other than comedy.

orblivion 17y ago

Oh, this poor company. I don't think this is going to work out.

api 17y ago

How does crap on a plate like this get funding when there are so many more worthy projects out there?